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My Main Telescope - C14 and Paramount ME

My new Paramount MyT and 8-inch Ritchey-Chretien Telescope

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My Meade 12 inch SCT on a CGEM (Classic) Mount

My 4 inch Meade Refractor with Sky Watcher Guidescope and ZWO camera on a CGEM (Classic) Mount

Skywatcher Star Adventurer Mount with Canon 40D

 

My Solar setup using a DSLR and Mylar Filter on my ETX90

DSLR attached to ETX90. LiveView image of 2015 partial eclipse on Canon 40D

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 I try to log my observing and related activities in a regular blog - sometimes there will be a delay but I usually catch up. An index of all my blogs is on the main menu at the top of the page with daily, weekly or monthly views. My Twitter feed is below. I am also interested in photograping wildlife when I can and there is a menu option above to look at some of my images. I try to keep the news feeds from relevant astronomical sources up to date and you will need to scroll down to find these.

The Celestron 14 is mounted on a Paramount ME that I have been using for about 10 years now - you can see that it is mounted on a tripod so is a portable set up. I still manage to transport it on my own and set it all up even though I have just turned 70! It will run for hours centering galaxies in the 12 minute field even when tripod mounted.

 

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« Skywatcher Star Adventurer Portable Setup Part 3 | Main | My Portable Equipment Part 1 »
Saturday
Jan022016

Jupiter through the clouds. My Portable Equipment Part 2

DateSaturday, January 2, 2016 at 8:23AM

 

Just in case the sky was clear I checked at 3.45 this morning. Cloud everywhere but Jupiter was so bright at magnitude -2.2 I could see it through the clouds as it approached the meridian. 

 

Skywatcher Star Adventurer Portable Setup Part  2

The image below labels the parts of the setup

The image below shows the output from the external battery for the camera feeding to the dummy battery. The voltage is higher than that provided by the original internal battery so if you try this it is at your own risk. It seems to work OK and I only tried this after seeing reports from others who had used this battery over a period of time successfully!


The external rechargeable battery for the camera has outputs at 12V, 9V and 5V (USB). I use the 9V output to feed to my dummy battery and this works very well. I can use the 5V USB output to drive the Star Adventurer mount at the same time but clearly this will deplete the battery more rapidly and there will be a trailing lead from the moving battery on top of the camera to the static mini USB input to the star adventurer which will wind the cable around the camera as the mount tracks the sky during the night - not a good idea. So - I have a second identical battery that is attached to the tripod feeding only the mount 5V input removing this problem. If either battery were to go flat the appropriate output from the other battery can be used in an emergency - monitoring the cable being wound up very carefully!

TO BE CONTINUED

 

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